Trump’s rhetoric on North Korea echoes loudly in void of US diplomacy

The US president refuses to dial down the war of words with Pyongyang despite his state department being in no fit state to deal with the crisis

It took more than seven months for the Trump administration to encounter its first real foreign crisis, and when it came, it was largely self-inflicted.

The challenge posed by the North Korean regime’s nuclear weapons programme had been festering for more than a decade but it was Donald Trump who turned it into a global emergency with a few words. The president took his own staff unawares when he went off script on Tuesday to vow “fire and fury like the world has never seen” if the Pyongyang regime made further threats against the US.